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With Multiple Personalities, Polestar Plots Its Post-Volvo Course

While car companies fill their days and their coffers assembling politely refined S.U.V.s and sedans, many harbor deviant sub-brands that — using a potion of horsepower and handling — transform their mannerly Dr. Jekyll-mobiles into cackling, libertine Mr. Hydes.

Mercedes has AMG, BMW has its M cars, Subaru its STIs, Fiat has Abarth, and so on.

And then there is Polestar, a performance wing of Volvo — sort of.

Long before Volvo gained renown for making drably reliable, tank-like luxury vehicles for prosperous Vermonters, it established its high-performance bona fides. In 1928 the PV4, a saloon car with a leatherette-covered wooden body, won its class in the grueling 800-plus-mile Leningrad-Moscow-Leningrad endurance race. In the following decades, Volvo became a force in rally racing and made a name on the track under the Polestar banner, and on the street by shaming muscle cars with its turbo-wagons and “R” models.

Those feisty R models and Polestar editions were primarily promoted in car enthusiast magazines, while the mass advertising pushed safety. Vacillating between its safety and performance attributes, Volvo offered a message as mixed as the product line. It built performance cars that weren’t Polestars and Polestars that weren’t performance cars, notably the stylish but doggy C30 Polestar Limited Edition.

Against this muddled backdrop comes a Volvo spinoff, a new car company also named Polestar, which calls itself “an electric performance brand,” and which is jockeying to compete with Tesla.

Branding is important in the pioneering world of electric vehicles, where image can count as much as track record because often there is no track record.

Take Rivian, the electric truck maker. Despite losing money and having delivered few trucks, its carefully sculpted image aided its initial public offering and briefly put the company’s overall worth at $86 billion — greater than Ford Motor’s.

As Polestar prepares to go public through a SPAC, or special-purpose acquisition company, in the first half of the year, its blurry branding may be a grievous liability or a vast opportunity. Is the hazy What’s-a-Polestar image a blank slate on which to fashion an all-new brand, or will buyers seek a battery-powered vehicle whose identity is easily grasped?

The challenge, said Polestar’s chief executive, Thomas Ingenlath, is that the modern Polestar is not easily reduced to a single trait. “It is a sophisticated product,” he said. “There are layers to the brand. To get that rich color, it takes more time to get that across.”

Mr. Ingenlath with the Polestar 5.Credit…Polestar

That sophistication runs contrary to orthodox marketing wisdom. “What you don’t want to do is have a lot of complexity and a lot of unnecessary nuance when you are launching a new brand,” said Kelly O’Keefe, who heads Brand Federation and who has consulted major car brands. “When you talk about new innovations, there is no value in linking to a legacy — none.”

A Critical Year for Electric Vehicles

The popularity of battery-powered cars is soaring worldwide, even as the overall auto market stagnates.

  •  Going Mainstream: In December, Europeans for the first time bought more electric cars than diesels, once the most popular option.
  •  Turning Point: Electric vehicles account for a small slice of the market, but in 2022, their march could become unstoppable. Here is why.
  •  Tesla’s Success: A superior command of technology and its own supply chain allowed the company to bypass an industrywide crisis.
  •  Rivian’s Troubles: As the electric vehicle maker pares down its delivery targets for 2022, investors worry the company may not live up to its promise.
  •  Green Fleet: Amazon wants electric vans to make its deliveries. The problem? The auto industry barely produces any of the vehicles yet.

Volvo’s DNA — its values, engineering and marketing — has been inherited by Polestar, and Volvo didn’t always tread the accepted path, sometimes to its advantage.

After Volvo’s Leningrad-Moscow Race win, the company became a powerhouse in rally driving. When a photo of Gunnar Andersson winning the 1958 Midnight Sun Rally in an airborne PV444 caused a sensation, Volvo saw a marketing opportunity. The photo — retouched to look like the newer PV544 model — and Mr. Andersson himself were featured in promotions.

Gunnar Andersson winning the 1958 Midnight Sun Rally. The photo was retouched to look like Volvo’s newer PV544 model.Credit…Volvo

By the ’60s, Volvo’s image shifted thanks to a late-1950s run of safety innovations capped by the three-point seatbelt, which it allowed other companies to copy and improve on, despite a patent. Volvo’s safety reputation was cemented.

The company prospered on this reputation for decades, but eventually consumer research showed it was thought that Volvo’s safety was such a given that showcasing it no longer drew buyers. They wanted cars that were fun to drive. Volvo sought a new message.

Ads shifted back to performance, most pointedly in the “Naughty Volvo” TV ads from 2010, which featured Volvos in showy high-speed maneuvers with a keening guitar soundtrack.

That same year, Volvo tantalized car buffs with a C30 concept car developed in partnership with Polestar racing, a brutish 405-horsepower all-wheel-drive shooting brake in a bright blue color variously called Rebel Blue, Cyan or “Swedish Racing Green.” When Volvo said it would bring 250 limited-edition Polestar C30s to the States, it appeared Polestar’s AMG moment had arrived.

Car companies have sub-brands like AMG, STI and Abarth for good reason. High-performance cars can be finnicky and expensive to buy and maintain. The sub-branding keeps those irksome traits from tarring the image of the day-to-day vehicles. And it impresses automotive opinion makers with what a company can produce when let off the leash.

But in 2010, at the peak of the performance push, Ford, which had purchased Volvo in 1999, sold it to Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in China. It was the end of Polestar’s apparent AMG ambitions. When the Polestar C30 arrived in U.S. dealerships in 2013, it had a modest 10 percent more horsepower than the stock model.

And therein lay a lesson in image administration. Plans set in motion typically take five years to play out, both for manufacturing and marketing. Volvo’s message shift to performance left its monopoly on safety vulnerable. The less expensive Subaru mounted a challenge. A 2006 print ad for its Tribeca S.U.V. was headlined, “Airbags Save Lives. All-Wheel Drive Saves Airbags.” Safety-focused ads continue today. Richard Muir, an account director at Volvo’s ad agency from 2014 through 2016, recalled that “Subaru stole safety while Volvo was asleep at the wheel.”

Between the change in Volvo ownership and shifts in marketing, the Polestar brand became hazier.

When Geely bought the Polestar name from its racing partner (now Cyan Racing) in 2015, it repurposed Polestar as a new brand of electric cars and an innovation lab for Volvo.

Adding to the jumble, today Polestar calls itself an independent brand, although Volvo still offers a Polestar Engineered V60 T8 wagon, an electric hybrid.

Volvo’s Polestar Engineered V60 T8 wagon, an electric hybrid.Credit…Volvo

Roger Ormisher, formerly Volvo’s global director of brand and product experience, summed it up: “What was Polestar to the brand? Was it AMG? Was it racing? Was it an upgrade to your car?”

The brand confusion may affect Polestar as it goes public, aiming to raise the money essential to expansion that will help it compete with Tesla and Rivian.

Going public via SPAC has been popular for upstart car brands, but they have been subject to turmoil. Canoo, Lucid, Nikola and Lordstown Motors have been or currently are under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The chiefs of Canoo, Nikola and Lordstown resigned while facing controversy related to their SPAC deals. A hot finance instrument last year, SPACs have been generally losing favor.

Polestar says its lack of image and its Volvo heritage will both pay off for investors. It positions itself as the best of both worlds, a move-fast-and-break-things innovator with the stability of a legacy company.

There is some question if a company can be both an innovative electric performance brand and a stolid legacy brand. Its first car, the Polestar 1, an impressive $150,000 carbon-fiber-bodied hybrid-drive sports car, was not purely electric. Its second car, the 2, is a reasonable alternative to a Tesla, but its performance qualifications are open to debate. Its third car, the soon-to-be-released 3, is an S.U.V. The 4 will be a smaller S.U.V. Until the critically lauded Precept concept car is released as the 5 in 2024, Polestars will be built on a Volvo chassis.

In fairness, claiming an array of qualities is what Volvo has always done. Through Volvo’s history, company brochures have credibly played up a combination of durability, reliability, safety, comfort and performance. Now Polestar adds sustainability. Volvo traditionally eschewed sloganeering for wordy, informative ads aimed at a sophisticated buyer.

In its past Volvo flew in the face of marketing orthodoxy, as Polestar does today. Contradicting orthodoxy is what makes geniuses geniuses — if they succeed. And ultimately the investor land rush to E.V. companies may render every other consideration moot. Mr. Ingenlath may be anointed a genius if the Precept turns out to be a three-point seatbelt. If it’s another blue C30, the I-told-you-so chorus will be deafening.

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